Cloud-based information technology (IT)-based monitoring systems enable IT professionals to monitor customer systems from a remote location. For example, suppose that a small company has an inventory of 100 desktop PCs for its employees' use. Suppose further that each of those PCs has the same configuration according to a company policy. An IT professional whose job is to oversee the operation of the company's PCs uses such an IT-based monitoring system to make sure the PCs are operating without critical problems, and operate according to the company policy. This means that the IT professional uses the monitoring system to identify possible problems such as disk failure, network failure, and configuration changes to the PCs and decide whether or not to take corrective action.
Some IT-based monitoring systems provide automated alerts to the IT professional when there is a failure of a computing system, or an unplanned configuration change or when a critical threshold for failures or change events is met within a group of computing devices which that IT professional is monitoring. Such alerts come in the form of emails, SMS messages, and the like, and provide the IT professional real-time reaction to computer errors and failures, and potentially dangerous configurations that may be the result of an outside attack on a network or internal theft. For example, the monitoring system may send the IT professional an alert in response to a disk errors logged in the system log, a service liveness test failing (e.g. a internal web server is down) or internet security software being disabled on an employee's computer.
The number of possible problems for which the monitoring system may send the IT professional an alert, however, is potentially enormous. To that effect, a conventional IT-based monitoring system allows an IT professional to manually tailor a set of alerting conditions in order to filter out those that are unimportant. In this way, the IT professional may tailor the alerting system to cover and appropriately prioritize (e.g. critical problems result in a phone call, less critical ones in an email, etc.) those problems which he or she knows from experience need the utmost attention.